Updated 16 August 2026
On 2 July 2026, TV Time told its users it was closing. On 15 July, thirteen days later, it did. The apps came off both stores, the website went dark, and account data was deleted. Somewhere between twenty five and twenty six million people lost, in some cases, a decade of episode ticks. This is what that teaches you about every other app holding your viewing history, including ours.
TV Time was not a failing product. It had more than twenty five million registered users and daily engagement most apps never see. It closed anyway, and the reason is worth understanding properly, because it was not bad luck.
The app was free. The money came from somewhere else: aggregated viewing data, sold to studios and networks as business intelligence about what people actually watch. The users were not the customers. They were the sensor network. When the parent company changed hands in early 2025 and its new owners redirected it toward AI products, the community stopped being a business line and became a cost. Costs get cut.
Thirteen days is not much notice for a decade of data. There was an export tool, and people who saw the announcement in time used it. Everyone who was on holiday, or between phones, or simply not paying attention to app news that fortnight, got nothing. The export tool went offline with the rest of the service, so as of today there is no way to generate one. Those histories are not recoverable by any app, by us or by anyone else, no matter what a migration guide promises.
Outright shutdowns are the dramatic case. The ordinary case is a service that stays alive while quietly changing the deal, and 2026 has been a good year for examples.
In February, Trakt revised its limits. Some of it was generous, with the free watchlist going from 100 items to 250. One part was not: free accounts are now allowed a single connected third party app, when one shared history across every app you use was the reason Trakt existed. The year before, subscribers on older legacy rates were moved onto the standard sixty dollars a year, which for some roughly doubled the bill.
Simkl, meanwhile, is generous with what you can put in and less so with what you can take out. Backups and exports sit behind its paid tiers, or behind using the service at least twenty days a month.
Neither of those is scandalous. Both companies have real running costs and are entitled to cover them. The point is narrower and more useful: the terms you signed up under are not the terms you will be living under in three years, and the direction of travel is rarely toward more for free.
Before you move years of history into anything, including ours, these four are worth two minutes each.
If the answer is not you, it is an advertiser, a data buyer, or an investor expecting a return. None of those three has any obligation to your watch history, and all three can change their minds without asking. This is not an argument that free is bad. Plenty of free software outlives paid software. It is an argument for knowing the answer, because the answer predicts what the app becomes.
Not whether the company promises portability. Whether you, right now, on the tier you are actually on, can press a button and receive a file. Go and look for it. If the export is behind a subscription, that is worth knowing before your library is large enough to be worth exporting, not after.
An export you cannot use is a souvenir. What makes a file portable is stable identifiers. If each row carries a TMDB or IMDb id, another app can match your library exactly. If it carries only titles and years, whoever imports it is guessing, and guessing goes wrong on remakes, on translated titles, and on every show called The Office.
This is the question the other three lead to. For most trackers the honest answer is: whatever you exported, and nothing else, because the library lives on their servers and the app is a window onto it. When the servers go, the window shows nothing. That is not a design flaw, it is simply what an account based service is.
Worth being precise here, because the word "backup" gets used for two different things.
An export is portability. It is your data in a form you can open, read and hand to something else. A CSV opens in Numbers, Excel or any text editor, and it will still open in twenty years with no company involved.
An export is usually not a restore. Most apps, ours included, cannot read their own export back in and rebuild your library from it. That sounds like a flaw and mostly is not: a restore format has to capture everything, while a portable file only has to capture what matters to a human and to the next app. Knowing which one you are holding matters, though. If you delete your account expecting the CSV to put it all back, you will be disappointed.
The drill, which takes five minutes. Export your library today, from whatever you use now. Open the file and look at it. Check there is an id column. Put it somewhere that is not the app and not that phone. Then do it again once a year. That is the whole discipline, and it is worth more than any promise on any pricing page, including this one.
It would be cheap to write all of the above and not submit to it, so here are our answers, including the parts that are not flattering.
Who pays? You do, once. $2.99, after eight free titles. No subscription, no ads, no data sold to anybody, because there is no server to collect it on. If nobody buys it, the app stops getting new features. It does not stop working.
Can you export today, for free? Yes. Export is free for everyone and always has been, and the paid feature is the importer, which brings a library in. An app that makes it easy to move in and charges you to move out has its incentives pointed the wrong way.
Is the file readable? It is a CSV with a TMDB id on every row, alongside titles, statuses, seasons watched, ratings and services. Any developer can match that exactly rather than fuzzily.
If we vanished tonight? Your library is on your phone, and it syncs between your own Apple devices through your own iCloud account. We do not hold a copy. So the honest answer is that nothing immediate would happen: the app would keep launching, your library would still be there, your notifications would keep arriving. That is not a promise we are making, it is just what happens when there is no server in the middle. There is no switch for anyone to flip.
Now the uncomfortable half. We are small. If development stopped, the app would keep working until an iOS release eventually broke something, and then it would not, and nobody would fix it. Details fetched from the internet, like new episode dates and where to watch things, come from an external service and would stop being refreshed. ReelStack is also Apple only, so if you move to Android, your library moves as a CSV or not at all. None of that is solved by our architecture. What the architecture solves is narrower: your history does not disappear on somebody else's schedule.
Whatever you choose should hold up against the four questions above. On an iPhone, here is how ReelStack answers them, including the parts that are not flattering. Then, in the first week, find the export button and press it, and keep the file somewhere the app cannot reach. Twenty five million people did not get the chance to do that in July, and the ones who lost the least were the ones who had already done it years earlier for no particular reason.
An episode and film tracker for iPhone and iPad. No account, no subscription, no server holding your library. $2.99 once, first eight titles free, free CSV export from day one.
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